- David Martin, Nielsen Online

NEW YORK Our recent post about how the majority of people who use Twitter wind up abandoning the service received a lot of great coverage and feedback. We also received a healthy amount of criticism from the Twitter community who were concerned that our study sold Twitter short because it failed to take into account applications and other Web sites that feed into the Twitter community.

So, as an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 Web sites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr and many others.

The results verified our initial findings: about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month. The yearlong retention curve looks very much the same as the one for just Twitter.com.

Clearly, this exercise illustrates the power, passion and influence of the Twitter community. There is no question that this finding would not have spread as quickly as it did without the engaged and vocal user base that has adopted Twitter as a way of life.

Keep the feedback coming, no matter how you feel about this issue. We look forward to continuing to provide you with timely and engaging insights on this and other topics.

Adweek is a unit of the Nielsen Co.

David Martin is vp, primary research, Nielsen Online.

Follow the "Twitter Quitters" conversation on our TweetFreak blog.

Source: NielsenWire.com